Alabama Demands Voter ID—Then Closes Driver’s License Offices In Black Counties

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Alabama Demands Voter ID—Then Closes Driver's 

License Offices In Black Counties

What happens when a state with a tough voter ID law suddenly makes it much harder for minorities to get...

What happens when a state with a tough voter ID law suddenly makes it much harder for minorities to get driver’s licenses? We are about to find out in Alabama.

Facing a budget crisis, Alabama has shuttered 31 driver’s license offices, many of them in counties with a high proportion of black residents. Coming after the state recently put into effect a tougher voter ID law, the closures will cut off access — particularly for minorities — to one of the few types of IDs accepted.

According to a tally by AL.com columnist John Archibald, eight of the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters saw their driver’s license offices closed.

“Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one,” Archibald wrote.

Archibald also noted that many of the counties where offices were closed also leaned Democrat.

“But maybe it’s not racial at all, right? Maybe it’s just political. And let’s face it, it may not be either.” he wrote. “But no matter the intent, the consequence is the same.”

The voter ID law passed in 2011 — which tightened previous ID requirements –includes driver’s licenses on a very short list of government-issued photo IDs accepted in order to vote in the state. If a resident does not have the proper ID he or she must get two poll officials to vouch for his or her identity. Additionally, residents without photo ID can apply for a free state photo ID. The law was put into effect in 2014.

Before Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) signed the voter ID legislation, the ACLU-Alabama said it would have “a disproportionate negative impact on minority voters,” noting that 62 percent of black Alabama residents depend on public transport, compared to 34 percent of whites.

Challenges to voter ID laws are being litigated across the country, with a Texas case expected to end up in the Supreme Court. In that case, the appeals court ruled that the Texas law violated the Voting Rights Act because it had a discriminatory effect on minority voters.

A Department of Justice official explained in 2014 that the agency challenged the Texas law, but not the Alabama law, because at the time only Texas’ law required some residents to drive hundreds of miles to attain the proper ID.

In 2013, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, a case which originated in Alabama.

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How Trump's Nationwide Voter Data Request Could Lead to Voter Suppression 
Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post 
Ingraham writes: "President Trump's Election Integrity Commission is asking all 50 states to turn over all publicly available voter registration data, including highly sensitive information. Voting rights groups immediately pushed state governors to reject the request, saying it would put a massive trove of information in the hands of people who couldn't be trusted with it." 
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Secretary of State Kris Kobach of Kansas. (photo: Getty)

ALSO SEE: White House Panel Asks States for
Voter Rolls and California Says 'No'

resident Trump's Election Integrity Commission is asking all 50 states to turn over all publicly available voter registration data, including highly sensitive information about voters' political affiliation, Social Security numbers, criminal history and military status.

Voting rights groups immediately pushed state governors to reject the request, saying it would put a massive trove of information in the hands of people who couldn't be trusted with it. The request was initiated by commission co-chair Kris Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas and a fervent believer that voter fraud is widespread despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

In Kansas, Kobach championed the use of Crosscheck, a multistate database of voter registration information that authorities use to check whether voters are registered in two states. The system works primarily by matching voters' names and dates of birth — if the same name and date of birth show up for voters in two different states, the system flags them as possible double registrations.

Kobach has said he's interested in using a similar process to compare state voter roll data to a federal database of legal immigrants, creating what Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, calls “Crosscheck on steroids.”

Researchers have found that Crosscheck's matching algorithms are highly inaccurate. A recent working paper by researchers at Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Microsoft found that Crosscheck's algorithm returns about 200 false positives for every one legitimate instance of double registration it finds.

“We're concerned about unlawful voter purging, which has been something that Kris Kobach has been leading the charge,” said Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department's civil rights division.

“It's a real concern that he'd be building a nationwide database of voters,” Gupta added. “The question is: How does this data get used?”

An expansion of the Crosscheck system would be “a recipe for massive amounts of error,” according to elections expert Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School. “When you've got hundreds of millions of records, and thousands of John Smiths, trying to figure out which of them are your John Smith without making a mistake is well nigh impossible.”

The commission has not made any public statements about what it intends to do with the voter roll data it receives from states. A representative for Kobach in the Kansas Secretary of State's office referred all inquires to the commission, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Trump created the commission in May after he claimed, without evidence, that 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the 2016 election. Kobach has appeared on cable news outletsmaking similar claims.

“This commission has been, from the beginning, an effort to sell Trump's lie that he won the popular vote,” Ho said. “Kobach's echoed that sentiment himself on camera. Now they've set up this commission that's going to create phony findings to support that lie.”

Some of Kobach's voter ID requirements have been struck down in federal court, with one federal judge ruling that they constituted “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.” And earlier this month, a federal judge fined Kobach $1,000 for “presenting misleading arguments in a voting-related lawsuit,”according to Politico.

“It's crazy that the administration would now expect every voter in the country to turn over their personal data to this person,” Ho said.

Levitt said he is concerned that the commission has "not thoroughly thought through" the implications of what it's asking for. He notes that the letter invited states to send sensitive voter roll information over email, which is highly insecure.

Levitt also calls the commission's July 14 deadline for sending the data "ludicrous," adding "there is no national system of records with hundreds of millions of datapoints that anyone has built reliably in two weeks."

One final red flag in the commission's request, according to Levitt, is the inclusion of data on voters' party affiliation. While states are allowed to maintain this information, the federal Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the federal government from keeping records of voters' party affiliation except in rare circumstances, Levitt said.

Levitt said the Privacy Act was enacted following the Watergate scandal and concerns about Richard Nixon collecting personal information on American voters.

“Whether someone is eligible to vote or not does not depend on what party they are registered with,” Levitt said. “It is difficult for me to understand what legitimate use there might be” for that data.

However, he added, “It's not difficult to imagine the propaganda value behind it.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/44427-how-trumps-nationwide-voter-data-request-could-lead-to-voter-suppression

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Republicans Are Using Fake Voter Fraud to Crush Voting Rights 
Carter Sherman, Vice News 
Sherman writes: "President Donald Trump may have claimed that he 'won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,' but there's no evidence of illegal voting last November - in fact, multiple investigations have found that kind of election fraud in the U.S. to be virtually nonexistent. Nevertheless, state lawmakers across the country are proposing legislation they say is meant to combat it." 
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African-American voters. (photo: Leah Rigueur)

resident Donald Trump may have claimed that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” but there’s no evidence of illegal voting last November — in fact, multiple investigations have found that kind of election fraud in the U.S. to be virtually nonexistent. Nevertheless, state lawmakers across the country are proposing legislation they say is meant to combat it.

As of May, lawmakers in 31 states had introduced at least 99 bills that would restrict access to registration and voting since the beginning of 2017, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Six state legislatures — Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, and North Dakota — have passed such bills in the first half of 2017, which is three more states than enacted similar bills in the previous two years combined.

“We’re only six months into the year, and I think it’s unusual to have this much focus and attention on imposing new rules and restrictions on valid access,” said Kristen Clarke, head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “From where I sit, states are responding to the president’s dog whistle.”

But states were already moving to enact restrictions before Trump was elected. As the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program counsel Jonathan Brater pointed out, several secretaries of state — they often oversee elections — have denounced Trump’s claims of voter fraud. Mark Lowery, a Republican Arkansas state representative who sponsored a 2017 law that limits forms of acceptable voter ID, told VICE News that he’d begun drafting his bill before the 2016 election.

So there’s another factor at play: Republicans’ total power over state legislatures.

“Over the last few years, all of the most restrictive voting laws have passed through governments that were entirely controlled by the Republican Party,” Brater said. “And so there’s a strong partisan push here, and that’s held true this year.”

Republicans maintain so-called trifectas — when a party controls the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature — in five of the six states that have passed major voting limitations this year. (Republicans currently hold trifectas in another 21 other states.)

People do impersonate others to vote illegally, but nowhere near on the scale that Trump claimed. ADartmouth College statistical analysis of the 2016 election found zero evidence to support his statement, and of the more than 1 billion total votes cast in U.S. elections between 2000 and 2014, one researcher found only 31 credible incidents of voter fraud.

That researcher, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt — whose investigation found that statistic that only one ballot in about 32 million will involve voter impersonation — wrote in the Washington Post in 2014, “Requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens.”

But laws mandating that voters present photo IDs at polls and that limit the number of acceptable ID do have at least one effect: They generally “skew democracy in favor of whites and those on the political right,” according to three University of California San Diego researchers’ analysis of the nation’s photo voter ID laws, because minority voters — who often vote Democrat — are less likely to turn out to vote.

The rate of voting restriction legislation this year pales in comparison to 2011 and 2012, when 19 states passed at least 25 laws restricting voting access. Ultimately many of those laws were blocked or struck down by courts, but states appear to now be pushing modified versions.

“We’re seeing a lot of states go back in the legislative sessions and try to reinstitute different versions of those laws,” Brater said. Of the six states that have passed new voting restrictions this year, the Brennan Center found, four have in the past lost legal challenges to similar laws.

In 2014, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s 2013 voter ID law for violating the state’s constitution, ruling that to enforce the law would disenfranchise voters. Some of the court’s judges also found that the law’s constitutionality didn’t matter because the legislature passed the bill without a two-thirds majority, the number of votes needed to change the state constitution, that alone was enough to block its implementation.

This year, Lowery’s bill got that majority.

“We do have a supermajority now of Republicans in the House, and that allowed us to be able to get the two-thirds margin that we needed,” Lowery said, adding that he feels the new version of the law doesn’t disenfranchise voters thanks to changes like a provision that allows people with photo IDs to cast provisional ballots after signing sworn statements confirming their identities.

Lowery also pointed out that a majority of Americans support voter ID laws, according to Gallup, though Republicans support them far more than Democrats do. Republicans are also more likely to believe that voter fraud is a major problem.

“Perception creates reality,” Lowery said. “That’s the main thing you have to look at, not that people know for sure that there has been fraud…. The voter ID bill actually is an attempt to be able to regain that confidence, which is an important part of the democratic process.”

But Danielle Lang, who works on voter rights and redistricting issues for the Legal Campaign Center, called arguments like Lowery’s “particularly cynical” because it was lawmakers who manufactured the “phantom problem” of election fraud in the first place.

“They created this perception,” she said, “and now they’re saying, ‘Oh, we have to fix it with the bills that we want.’”

Candice Broce, the press secretary for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who will soon have to implement a new voter registration requirement, says that the term “voter fraud” could cover a variety of activities. Though Broce was not able to immediately provide an estimate of how often people impersonate others at the polls, she confirmed that Georgia did not see widespread voter fraud during the election.

Even as states battle legal challenges to certain voting restrictions, they pass others. Weeks after a federal judge once again ruled that Texas’ voter ID law intentionally sought to keep minorities from voting, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passed a law to eliminate straight-ticket voting. Supporters say the measure will make voters pay more attention to individual races, while opponents argue the move will disproportionately affect minority voters; a federal judge’s ruling blocked a similar law in Michigan last year for that very reason.

“They just seem not to care about continuing along this path of cutting back of minority access, even in light of repeated federal court losses,” Lang said. Whenever a state lawmaker introduces a new voting restriction, she added, “I’m shocked all the time. And then it just passes.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/44381-republicans-are-using-fake-voter-fraud-to-crush-voting-rights

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RSN: Donald Trump Orders "Election Integrity" Commission Headed by Architects of Voter Suppression

The GOP has worked diligently to prevent Americans from voting by creating obstacles such as: 

DISCRIMINATORY VOTER ID LAWS 
MAKING VOTER REGISTRATION INCONVENIENT
CREATING LONG LINES AT POLLING PLACES BECAUSE OF DELIBERATE ACTIONS
MOVING POLLING PLACES WITH NO NOTICE, INADEQUATE PARKING
FRAUDULENT VOTER PURGES 
PROVISIONAL BALLOTS THAT REMAIN UNCOUNTED
ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES WITH NO PAPER TRAIL
IN WISCONSIN, DIRTY ENERGY KOCH BROTHERS' COUNTRY, VOTE TALLIES EXCEEDED POPULATION
VOTER INTIMIDATION & HARASSMENT 
RACIALLY DISCRIMINATORY GERRYMANDERING

And much else.  


Donald Trump Orders "Election Integrity" Commission Headed by Architects of Voter Suppression 
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! 
Goodman reports: "Voting rights activists are expressing alarm after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday creating a 'Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.'" 
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President Trump. (photo: Getty)

Donald Trump Orders "Election Integrity" Commission Headed by Architects of Voter Suppression

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

12 May 17

Voting rights activists are expressing alarm after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday creating a "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity." Particularly worrying to voting right activists is the selection of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as the vice chair of the commission. Kobach has pushed for the strictest voter identification laws in the country and advocated for a "proof-of-citizenship" requirement at the state and federal levels. For more, we speak with Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for The Nation, where he covers voting rights. His recent piece is headlined "Trump’s Commission on 'Election Integrity' Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression."

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Voting rights activists are expressing alarm after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday creating a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The move comes after Trump repeatedly claimed that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in November because between 3 [million] and 5 million people voted illegally. No evidence has ever been presented backing up his claim. On Thursday, Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders unveiled the plan for the new election integrity commission.

DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: I’d like to announce the president also just signed another executive order establishing the bipartisan Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. ... The commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of federal elections, and provide the president with a report that identifies system vulnerabilities that lead to improper registrations in voting.

AMY GOODMAN: Civil rights groups and several Democratic lawmakers denounced the election integrity commission, suggesting it’s designed to perpetuate the myth of voter fraud as a pretense for new policies that will make it harder to vote—policies such as voter ID laws, eliminating early voting and prohibiting same-day voter registration. Particularly worrying to voting right activists is the selection of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as the vice chair of the commission. Kobach has pushed for the strictest voter identification laws in the country and advocated for a proof-of-citizenship requirement at the state and federal levels.

Meanwhile, a new report has called into question whether President Trump would have actually won Wisconsin during the 2016 presidential election without the state’s strict voter ID law. The study, published by the progressive advocacy group Priorities USA, says the law suppressed the votes of more than 200,000 residents, the majority of whom were African-American and Democratic-leaning. President Trump won only about 23,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for The Nation, where he covers voting rights. His recent piece is headlined "Trump’s Commission on 'Election Integrity' Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression." Explain why, Ari.

ARI BERMAN: Well, I think it’s—first off, it’s important to note this is not an election integrity commission. This is a voter suppression commission, because there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud to investigate. Everyone who’s looked at this, including Trump’s own lawyers, during the recounts in Michigan and other states, have said that the election was not tainted by fraud. So the only reason to do this and the only reason to announce it this week, other than to soothe Trump’s ego, other than to distract from the news about Comey and Russia, is to perpetuate the myth of voter fraud in order to lay the groundwork for policies that will suppress the vote.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what the commission is all about, how it came about, what its history is and what exactly it’s going to do.

ARI BERMAN: So I guess you could say the roots of it happened after the election, when Trump startled everyone by saying that he would have won the popular vote except for the fact that millions of people voted illegally. He has subsequently tweeted this. He subsequently said it. He’s provided no evidence for these claims. And so, it’s an attempt—just like what he said about wiretapping. There was no evidence of it. Then he calls for an investigation. And so, basically, he manufactured this issue. There was no evidence. And now we have an entire presidential commission designed to investigate it. There’s going to be taxpayer money. Some of the heaviest hitters in the Republican Party are part of this commission.

And I think it’s easy to just dismiss it as another laughable thing that Trump is doing to try to distract from the news, but the real worry here is that they’re going to say all of these outlandish things about voter fraud. It’s going to have the veneer of a presidential commission, and then they’re going to say, "Oh, by the way, there’s all this voter fraud, and now we should pass strict voter ID laws. We should pass proof-of-citizenship laws. We should cut early voting. We should purge the voting rolls. We shouldn’t just do it in the states where it’s already happening; we should do it on the national and federal level, as well." So, the president the United States endorsing a policy of voter suppression is absolutely chilling.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as you said, in January, President Trump called for this major investigation of voter fraud, as he continued to falsely assert he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because 3 [million] to 5 million unauthorized votes were cast in the election. So, ABC anchor David Muir questioned Trump about those claims.

DAVID MUIR: When you say, in your opinion, millions of illegal votes, that is something that is extremely fundamental to our functioning democracy—a fair and free election.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Sure, sure, sure.

DAVID MUIR: You say you’re going to launch an investigation into this.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Sure, done.

DAVID MUIR: What you have presented so far has been debunked. It’s been called false.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, it hasn’t. Take a look at the Pew reports.

DAVID MUIR: I called the author of the Pew report last night. And he told me that they found no evidence of voter fraud.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Really? Then why did he write the report?

DAVID MUIR: He said no evidence of voter fraud.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Excuse me. Then why did he write the report?

DAVID MUIR: So, I guess I’m—

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: According to Pew report—then he’s—then he’s groveling again. You know, I always talk about the reporters that grovel when they want to write something that you want to hear, but not necessarily millions of people want to hear or have to hear.

AMY GOODMAN: So that’s Donald Trump. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach defended Trump’s unfounded claim that millions of people illegally voted, supposedly costing Trump the popular vote. This is Kobach being questioned by reporters.

SECRETARY OF STATE KRIS KOBACH: I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point.

REPORTER: What tangible evidence is there that that actually happened?

SECRETARY OF STATE KRIS KOBACH: Well, this is the problem with aliens voting and aliens registering. There’s no way you can look on the voter rolls and say, "This one’s an alien. This one’s a citizen. This one’s an alien." You—once a person gets on the voter rolls, you don’t have any way of easily identifying them as aliens. And so you have to rely on post-election studies, like the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, where you get data from aliens themselves saying, "Oh, yeah, I voted." It does appear that aliens do vote in very large numbers.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Kris Kobach back in November, right after the election. Ari Berman?

ARI BERMAN: So, all of the available evidence shows that voter fraud is a very small problem in American elections, and that noncitizens voting is an even smaller problem in American elections, because just think about it, Amy. If you’re a noncitizen and you vote, you’re risking deportation. You’re risking a felony. You’re risking never being able to vote again if you become a U.S. citizen. So, all of these things are a huge risk to somebody. And people who are here either illegally or here legally but are noncitizens, the last thing they want to do is vote and get deported. So, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Just the numbers that we have show that in the 2016 election, The Washington Post found only four documented cases of voter fraud out of 135 million votes cast. It was 0.000002 percent of total votes. State-based reviews since then have found at most a few hundred alleged cases of voter fraud, not millions. In Kansas, Kris Kobach is the only secretary of state in the country with the power to prosecute voter fraud cases. He’s only convicted nine people of voter fraud since 2014 out of 1.8 million registered voters in that state. He’s only convicted one noncitizen of voting. So, if this problem was as widespread—

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t that citizen—did they vote for Trump?

ARI BERMAN: There was a different noncitizen who voted in Texas, not knowing that she was unable to vote, because usually this is what it is. If you’re a noncitizen and you vote, it’s usually because you believe you’re qualified, because you have documents like a green card or like a driver’s license, and you believe that you’re part of the political process. And they may ask you at the DMV, "Do you want to register to vote?" And you say, "Yes." But it’s nothing nefarious here. There was another case of someone who voted twice in Iowa—for Donald Trump—because she believed his claims that the elections were going to be rigged. So, I’m not saying this never happens, but it’s a very, very, very small problem. And usually it’s human error, not some sort of massive conspiracy underway.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/43533-donald-trump-orders-qelection-integrityq-commission-headed-by-architects-of-voter-suppression

RSN: The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters

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FOCUS: Greg Palast | The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters 

Greg Palast, Rolling Stone 
Palast writes: "When Donald Trump claimed, 'the election's going to be rigged,' he wasn't entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of 'voting many, many times.' What's far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud." 
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RSN: St. Louis Protests Tensions Run High

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Andy Borowitz | North Korean Government Reassures Citizens it Has Deep Bench of Brutal Madmen

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "As the mystery surrounding the absence of dictator Kim Jong-un deepens, the North Korean government on Wednesday issued an official statement reassuring its citizens that it had 'a deep bench of brutal madmen.'"
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GOP Voter ID Law Gets Crushed: Why Judge Richard Posner's Ruling Is so Amazing
Brad Friedman, The Brad Blog
Friedman writes: "If you read just one top-to-bottom dismantling of every supposed premise in support of disenfranchising Photo ID voting restrictions laws in your lifetime, let it be this one."
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Excerpt: "In a statement, Kmart said the security breach was discovered on 9 October and that the malware had been operating since early September."
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Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald
Pitts writes: "One’s sense of righteous vindication is tempered by the fact that police felt free to try this absurd stratagem in the first place -- and by the fact that this was hardly the only recent example of police using the Constitution for Kleenex."
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